Woodstock West: Generations Changed
Posted on 23. Nov, 2009 by Sheila Schroeder in Around Campus, Featured
Let me take you back to a time when bell-bottoms and tie-dye first roamed the campus. When buildings like the Daniels College of Business and Penrose Library did not exist. A time when The Doors playing DU was the hottest ticket in town, and when the most political and well-respected Rice on campus was not Condolezza but her father, Dean John Rice. This is a time when The Old Barn, not Magness Arena, was home to the hockey team and was the largest building on campus. I want to take you into that Old Barn. A large, unsettled crowd has gathered. This is May 8, 1970.
I must admit, I’m no expert on what happened prior to or following this pivotal meeting. I’m simply a part-time independent filmmaker, full-time associate professor, and part-time activist. I’m working on a film about this meeting and all the things that happened to make it necessary and what it accomplished. It’s a film about DU, activism, and the legacy that activism imprints on one’s life. I know that there is a film here, buried on the dusty shelves of the Penrose Library archives and in the foggy memories of those who lived through it. So take what follows knowing that I’m trying to complete a 1000-piece, double-sided, three-D puzzle without the picture on the box top to show me what the finished product should look like.
So let’s return to The Old Barn.
A similar crowd had gathered here nine days earlier, on April 28, 1970, but the circumstances had changed drastically in that short time. On April 28, radical lawyer and civil rights activist William Kunstler had spoken to a mostly student audience gathered in The Old Barn that night. Kunstler is most famously associated with his defense of “The Chicago Seven.” These were seven men (originally eight) who were on trial for conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention. At this time, Kunstler was perhaps the most well-known lawyer in the United States. Student activists at DU had invited Kunstler to address the campus, where various groups like the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and others were trying to gain a foothold within the student body.
Film footage of the event that April at DU recorded his words as follows: “They [the government] are facing a generation of embittered, frustrated young people who no longer can be channeled off into other rights and who are insisting that this country do no less than live up to all of its platitudes. That this country do no less than be what it was originally designed for, a free and open society which it is not today and has not been for generations.” He went on to say, “I don’t think we’re in the revolutionary stage. I think we’re in…the resistance stage…. I think we’re perilously close to that stage. I think people need to make very important decisions for themselves in the near future. I think the country is teetering on a revolutionary fulcrum and whether it goes the whole way remains to be seen.”
His words were prophetic. Two days later, an event tilted that fulcrum to the revolutionary stage. Newspaper headlines on April 30, 1970 hit many Americans like a brick to the nose: President Nixon had ordered bombing raids into Cambodia. Why was this the tipping point? Nixon had run in 1968 on the platform that he would end the Vietnam War, and many saw this bombing as both an expansion of a terribly divisive war and a complete betrayal of his campaign promise.
On campuses from New York to Washington state students expressed their rage by setting campus buildings on fire, staging sit-ins, going on strike and taking to the streets in protest. Remember, it was their generation that was being drafted, many against their will, into the armed forces. It was their generation carrying out the orders of the political elite in Washington. It was their generation that was sustaining the casualties, losing limbs, and living through trauma in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
It was this generation who protested on Monday, May 4, upon the Kent State University campus in the middle of Ohio. At what seemed like the end of a yet another anti-war protest on the campus, National Guard troops appeared to retreat. However, at the top of a rise known as The Commons, the guardsmen stopped, turned, knelt on the green grass and opened fire on the students for 11 seconds. Four students, two of whom were simply walking to class, died, while several others were injured. Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, (no relation) died of bullet wounds. Their deaths at the hands of our own troops shook the nation to the core.
Before news of this tragedy could filter up from Driscoll’s basement teletype machine, DU students were holding a meeting about whether to go on strike in order to show their solidarity with other campuses throughout the country. Yet once students began to see the headlines and photos in newspapers and watching the evening news, 1,500 of them gathered on the Carnegie Lawn and called for a strike. Almost immediately, Chancellor Maurice Mitchell released a statement that the University of Denver “is not on strike.”
Thus was born one of the central conflicts of what came to be known as Woodstock West, an encampment built, supported, and run by students. Tents, homemade lean-tos, and teepees turned the grounds where Penrose Library now stands into a campground of protest, a makeshift place of mourning, and an outdoor classroom where students guided the lessons during informal rap sessions. It was a place of music and performance and all were invited.
But Chancellor Mitchell was not about to let student activists take over his campus. So he called everyone to The Old Barn.
Find out what happens at the Old Barn in the next installment of Woodstock West: Generations Changed
Great post. Sheila, I helped bring (along with quite a few good friends and activists) Alan Canfora down to Colorado College. Canfora, for those not versed in student activism arcana, was one of nine students shot, but not killed, at Kent State on that fateful May 4. I would love to bring him here or to, at least, do a remembrance on that day.
Also, we need to not forget that another massacre occurred ten days later at Jackson State University, a historically black college in Jackson, MS. I suspect that a certain very hidden and latent racism pervades much discussion of this incident, while the Kent State Massacre is well-known (among left-wing college students and historians, anyway), the Jackson State killings are almost untouched (even I forgot the date and had to look it up) Two were killed (James Earl Green and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs), and twelve were wounded.
We probably should honor both incidents in some important way.